I’ve written a couple of times over the past 10 decade or so about a film clip, now nearly a century old, that shows a random person on a Los Angeles street talking on a cell phone.
Obviously this is not what was going on, although it sparked some fun conversation for a week or so back when a bored film buff discovered it on some DVD extras. It was apparently flung against the side of my brain, where it stuck, because I keep returning. Today, my friends, we shall solve the mystery.
Seriously, it’s not much of a mystery, and I have no intention of writing about it anymore. It’s a few seconds of a woman walking down a sidewalk, apparently talking and also apparently holding a rectangular object against her ear. It looks very much like behavior we see every day here in the 21st century, although it was taken in 1929. She just looks like she’s talking on a cell phone. That’s only briefly interesting, to me.
What I wonder is what she was actually doing, and why it was considered normal behavior in 1929. As I pointed out the last time I wandered down this road, there are no contemporaries of this person left to offer an explanation (i.e., a middle-aged person living in the late 1920s). It’ll remain a mystery, even though I’ve read a few reasonable explanations. I’m already bored again.
***
It’s the cell phone. Whenever I imagine trying to explain the present to someone from the past, which I do, now that I think about it, a lot, I always end up with the phone. The smart phone is the game changer when it comes to that was then, this is now conversations. The history of innovation in the last half of the 20th century is rich and dense, from the transistor to the semiconductor to the integrated circuit to the microprocessor, and that’s just one sliver of the story.
But everybody’s got a phone, full stop. They might be using it for Wordle only, but the power’s still in their pocket. Look, fictional person from 1962! You can watch TV and movies on it, and listen to music! But wait, there’s more! There’s no debate here. The smart phone wins the future by ubiquity alone.
It’s not the future anymore, though, just the now. And so I turn to Station Eleven.
***
It’s hard to explain my attraction to this story, the HBOMax limited series that ended last week. I’m certainly not the only one, too, although there are only a couple in my circle of friends who also have watched.
And I think it’ll take me a while to figure out what I think. I’ve written about it in other places already, enough for the time being. I seem to have settled on a personal theme as opposed to the more obvious ones (at least for the creators), the power of art on human lives, and the magic of finding people once thought lost.
I get all that. It’s really wonderful, it is, but I keep coming back to Before and After. That’s the story I needed someone to tell, right now, and Station Eleven fit the bill.
There’s a scene toward the beginning of the series, at this point set 20 years after a global pandemic that wiped out virtually all of humanity. Centered on the area around the Great Lakes in North America, we’re following a troupe of Shakespearean actors as they make an annual tour of the makeshift communities of survivors.
Our protagonist, Kirsten, a precocious 8-year-old when the pandemic hits and now one of the troupe’s leaders, is explaining a smart phone to a 20-year-old – that is, a postpan, a child born after the pandemic (or possibly anyone not yet an adult at the time; the show doesn’t provide a glossary). Kirsten herself has a fuzzy connection to the past, the world she knew for eight years having disappeared overnight two decades before, but she entertains her younger friend with the amazing things you could do with this little iPhone, now about as useful as an extension cord in this world without power.
***
This is the perspective I didn’t know I needed. For the past few years, I’ve been inexplicably drawn to odd subjects (for me), geography and world history and early human migration. It’s fun to learn new things, but now I think there was something else on my mind, and Station Eleven helped me figure some of it out.
I love the storytelling of history, and being the storyteller if I find a willing audience. I understand that part. It’s entertaining to enlighten myself and then share, but history is usually told in a progressive way, right? This is where we started, this is where we ended up, and maybe we’ll just gloss over those millennia when we didn’t really seem to be doing much at all.
That’s what I was looking for, the explanation for the asymmetry of human existence, the fits and starts. I’m not daydreaming about lost civilizations, just pointing out that empires rose and fell all the time, and those are just the ones we know about.
This is unknowable. Of course. I still want to know what happened. I want to know about all of the pandemics.
***
You know? I mentioned last night in a conversation that there seems to be (or there has been) a collective sense that we just need to cross this bridge. We need to get to the other side of the pandemic and then things can go back to normal, and I’m pretty sure most of us now understand, in some way, that this is not going to be the case.
For one thing, we’ve already crossed. The duration of the pandemic, running its natural and unnatural course, aided by mutations and politicians, changed us and we’re not changing back. C’mon, people. We never change back.
So that’s what I really want to know. I want to recognize what’s changed, what Before looked like and how After came to be.
And I want to see it through the eyes of my own version of Kirsten, my postpan grandson, now eight years old. He won’t be pondering vague memories of his iPhone, although in 20 years surely that will seem ancient and funny.
But there will be things, possibly things he can remember about life before Covid, and that’s what I want to remember, too. So I can tell him, so there is one less mystery. So he can appreciate that there’s always Shakespeare, maybe.